Authors: Tilly Bagshawe
D
IANA LAY ON
the carpeted floor in Brogan’s apartment—technically she supposed it was still their apartment, now that the divorce was on hold—and pulled her left knee up to her chest, mimicking the woman on the prenatal workout video. She still hadn’t figured out for sure whether the blonde, preternaturally smiley aerobics instructor was actually pregnant or whether she in fact had a small, perfectly rounded prosthesis strapped to a set of six-pack abs under her Nike shirt. Either way the woman looked fitter, slimmer, and bendier than anyone had a right to seven months into their pregnancy. If she said “Good jaaarb!” one more time in her upbeat, Disney-chipmunk voice, Diana would be sorely tempted to rip the flat-screen off the wall.
“And stretch it out. That’s right! Really feel that stretch in your lower back,” she cooed.
Christ, it hurt. Morning sickness she’d been expecting, but no one had warned her about the back pain that kept her awake now, night after night. She remembered joking about it with Danny in her first trimester, back when even the throwing up made her happy, proof that the child she’d longed for for so long was finally a reality.
“Just wait,” he used to tease her. “When you’re big and fat with varicose veins and a back like an old woman’s, you’ll be
moaning with the best of ’em: ‘Bloody baby! It’s all your fault, baby! You’ve ruined my body, you little shit!’”
“I will
not
,” she insisted, pretending to be offended, but unable to stop herself from grinning. “Every second of this pregnancy will be a joy. Just you see if it isn’t, Danny Meyer.”
They’d been so happy then. It was only five months ago, but now here she was alone, moaning as predicted…just not to him.
Feeling the black clouds descending again, she heaved herself to her feet and clicked off the DVD. Was there such a thing as prenatal depression? Waddling back into the guest bedroom, she opened the top drawer of the dresser and, pulling out a family-size bar of Cadbury’s chocolate—another vice that Danny had gotten her hooked on—began chomping through it. She’d decamped to the guest suite the moment she moved back in. The idea of sleeping in the former marital bed was just
too
weird, even in a domestic arrangement as fucked up and unorthodox as this one. She was ashamed to admit she’d lied about this subject to Brogan. Weak and shuddering with pain in the midst of another grueling session of chemo, he’d told her how he thought of her every night, asleep in their bed, and how much comfort that image brought him. She simply couldn’t bring herself to disillusion him, not then, and the time had never been exactly right since.
Other potentially troublesome subjects, such as what she planned to do after the baby’s birth, their divorce, and where Danny fit into her future, if anywhere, they avoided completely under a sort of taboo. So much needed to be said and done and dealt with. But until Brogan recovered or—the alternative that nobody mentioned aloud—died, nothing could be settled. In his current state of physical and emotional need, Diana looked on him as a child. He cried out to the strongest of all her instincts, the maternal, and she was physically incapable of not answering that call.
Polishing off the last few squares of chocolate (screw eating for two; she seemed to be eating for about two hundred) she glanced at her watch. Five past ten. She was due at the hospital at noon and had a million and one baby errands to run before then, including quietly returning the custom-made Versace nursery suite that Brogan had ordered and had fitted as a surprise for her last week.
That had been a bad day. Coming home from yoga to find that not only did Brogan clearly assume she would be raising her baby here, in his apartment, but that he figured she would wish her only child to wake up every morning in a gold-leaf-covered crib emblazoned with the O’Donnell “crest” (as invented by Brogan in 1986, showing a lion proudly rearing above a cut diamond) in polished black jet, and tucked snugly beneath cashmere leopard-print blankets that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Vegas strip joint.
On the other hand, it was one more gift than Danny had sent for the baby. At least in his own, deeply misguided way, Brogan appeared to be trying.
Stripping off her sweatpants and tank top, she was standing in her panties, idly cupping her swollen breasts in her hands and wondering if they were capable of getting any bigger, when the telephone rang.
Surprised—no one ever rang her at the apartment—she reached over to the bedside table and picked up.
“Diana O’Donnell.”
“Ah, Mrs. O’D. Aidan here. I was wondering if I could prevail upon you for a favor.”
Diana watched as the hairs on her forearms stood to attention, instantly alerted by his creepiness. Not so long ago, she remembered, he was into all that ridiculous “street talk.” Now, apparently, he thought he was a British butler from 1908.
Prevail upon you
indeed. Pretentious idiot.
“What is it, Aidan?” she said curtly. “I’m kinda swamped this morning, to be frank with you.”
“This shouldn’t take a second,” he oiled. “I’d come over there myself and pick it up, but I didn’t want to invade your privacy. I know you’re probably big into the nesting by this point, right? Getting the kid’s room ready and all that? I figured you wouldn’t want to be disturbed by the likes of me crashing around.”
“What do you want?” said Diana frostily.
“It’s nothing important. Just a couple of documents I thought you could bring to the hospital with you when you come. Addendums to your husband’s will.”
He knew she hated it when he referred to Brogan as her husband, as if they were still together as a couple, but she was hardly in a position to correct him. It was, after all, the literal truth.
“I believe there should be hard copies in the filing cabinet under ‘Estate Planning,’” said Aidan. “If I give you the dates of each letter they should be easy enough to find. Both are addressed to his trustees in Cayman.”
“That cabinet’s locked,” said Diana. “If you want the key, you’re going to have to ask Brogan where it is. I haven’t the foggiest.”
“Dammit. Of course.”
She could hear his irritation crackle down the phone line. So much for it being nothing important.
“How comfortable are you on a computer?” he asked, regaining his composure. “Do you know your way around e-mail?”
“Yeeees,” said Diana. Patronizing little shit. Whom did he think he was talking to? “And I can tie my own shoelaces too. Look, Aidan, I really am running late. But if you tell me where the files are, I’ll print them off and bring them with me, OK?”
Scribbling down what he told her on the back of a receipt, she at last got him off the phone and hurried into the shower. Drying and dressing as fast as she could in her current, inflated condition—putting socks on had become a struggle of seriously
comic proportions—she slipped into Brogan’s office and fired up the PC.
Grumbling at Aidan for forcing her to play secretary, although she supposed it was preferable to having him drop by the apartment, she clicked onto Brogan’s Outlook. His password—Eleanor, her middle name—hadn’t changed since they broke up, which she found oddly gratifying, and she was soon swimming about in a sea of unread messages. Typing in the keywords Aidan had given her—
estate, addendum
, and
trustee
—she was about to hit
FIND
when a message entitled “Cameron Drummond Murray” caught her attention.
Wasn’t Drummond Murray Scarlett’s last name?
With a lurching in her stomach that probably owed more to fear than guilt (she’d have made a terrible spy) Diana clicked open the e-mail. It was from Aidan, dated only a month ago.
See attached
, he wrote.
Already on their way to the London Sundays. If this doesn’t distract that bitch, nothing will.
For some reason Diana felt nervous, as if someone were about to tap her on the shoulder any moment and demand to know what she was doing snooping through Brogan’s inbox. Which was ridiculous, as she was alone in her own apartment. But she still glanced anxiously about her before opening the three attached JPEGs.
The first picture was such a shock she gasped aloud. A slightly pudgy young man whom she recognized instantly as Scarlett’s brother—despite his ugliness and Scarlett’s striking beauty there was an obvious family resemblance in the eyes and nose and the shape of the face—was on all fours, naked from the waist down, his mouth opened wide in a contorted “o” that could have expressed pain or pleasure or both. The male figure behind him was hazy. It looked like they were both in some sort of dungeon. But his role in the proceedings was brutally obvious.
Picture two was tamer and showed Cameron fully dressed, in a business suit, kissing a topless male companion full on the
mouth. This time they were in a gay bar and the love interest appeared to be some kind of dancer. Horrified, but compelled by curiosity, Diana clicked on the third image and immediately wished she hadn’t. Despite the deep shadows and the graininess of the low-res picture, it still looked like something Hieronymus Bosch might have painted. Bodies piled writhing on top of one another, with Cameron’s face clearly visible in the midst of it all, eyes wide and wild with sexual excitement.
Feeling sick and degraded, as if she were somehow complicit in these awful photographs, she closed the files and sat back in the office chair, breathing deeply to calm herself.
Brogan had promised her that he’d changed. That the days of his vendettas were past. He’d even gone as far as to indicate that he understood Scarlett’s passion on behalf of his mine workers, that since getting cancer himself he regretted having been so hard-line about paying for their health care. And yet here he was, apparently preparing to ruin an innocent young man’s life in the grossest, most intrusive way imaginable, simply to score some sort of sick “point” against his sister.
Heart pounding, she scrolled farther up the list of mail, hunting for Brogan’s response. Sure enough, one day later, there it was.
Good. Maybe the little pervert’ll do the decent thing and off himself. Let me know when it runs.
Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God. What was she doing here? How had she let this man, with all his hatred and intolerance and cruelty, back into her life?
She followed the thread into the following week, forcing herself to read the spiteful camaraderie between Brogan and Aidan as events began to unfold, right through to Brogan’s thwarted, splenetic fury when the paper changed its mind and declined to print the pictures after all. She was horrified by how regularly her own name cropped up in their online back-and-forth, with Brogan consistently referring to their future together as though it
were a certainty.
Once I’m well
, he wrote, on one particular note that made her blood run cold,
Diana and I will want to try again for more kids of our own. I don’t want any of this stress still hanging over our heads then. Whatever you do, you have to do it now.
Did he really think they were going to have children together? That, after everything, he would come home and they would simply pick up where they left off? Surely, she hadn’t encouraged him…
By the way
, her eyes were drawn to the postscript he’d written at the end of his last mail,
you can go ahead and make the offer on the new site in Canada. Take this e-mail as a formal instruction. If Miss Drummond Murray wanted to make a difference in Siberia, she’s made one. Those fuckers all hate me so much; let’s see how much better they like going back to work for the state. I want out of Yakutia. The sooner the better.
Diana caught her breath.
He was going to close the mine. He was going to turn those men and their families out on the street.
At once, her mind flew back to their conversation at his bedside a few weeks ago, after the radio program came out. What had he said to her again? “I intend to take urgent action.” Naturally she’d assumed he meant action to help the men whose lungs had been destroyed by conditions in his diamond mines. It hadn’t crossed her mind that “action” might mean shutting them down. Robbing them of their livelihoods and any last shred of hope for medical care and a better life.
How could he?
And all because he was pissed at Scarlett Drummond Murray for letting the world know the truth?
He hadn’t changed at all. Nor, it seemed, had she. She was still the same blind, trusting, forgiving fool she’d always been. Danny had warned her about what he called her “misplaced compassion” and where it might lead. And he’d been right. She remembered how passionately she’d insisted that compassion
could never be misplaced. That it could never do harm, that Danny was just jealous. But if it blinded you to the harm being done to others, then weren’t you, in fact, complicit in that harm? Perhaps if she’d opened her eyes sooner, she could have stopped what had happened to Scarlett’s family? Perhaps she could still stop what was about to happen in Yakutia?
In a daze, she returned to the letters Aidan had asked her to look for and printed them out. Stuffing them into her purse along with the nursery furniture receipt, she ran out the door, fleeing the apartment and its awful revelations as if it were on fire.
She still had no idea what she intended to do. All she knew was that she had to get out of there. And that even if it meant sleeping on the streets, she would never, ever go back.
“So when you say ‘remission,’” Brogan quizzed his doctor, “what does that mean exactly? Does that mean ‘gone’ or ‘gone for now’?”
“It means that, today, your levels of cancer cells are falling rather than rising,” said the doctor. A superstar from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Mike Cannons learned early on that Brogan O’Donnell was a man with whom one should always be direct. Tippy-toeing never failed to exacerbate his irritation, however bad the news may be. Happily, today he was bringing his patient the best news possible.
“It means this thing is in retreat,” he grinned. “It means you’ve won.”
“The battle or the war?” asked Brogan.
The doctor shrugged. “That depends how you look at it.”